Gleaming displays at Salt & Smoke, on Prospect Avenue. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
Red Bank may have lost one of its oldest neighborhood butcher shops last summer, but new owners are giving the space a new, spicier lease on life.
Also in this edition of redbankgreen‘s Retail Churn, a pottery instruction business takes over a tiny, hard-to-see spot in the heart of downtown.
Jane Kleiman, right, instructing Jillian Kreimer at Squatter Potters. Below, Salt & Smoke took over the Prospect Avenue space last occupied by Citarella’s market. (Photos by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
• Salt & Smoke Market has opened at 57-59 Prospect Avenue.
The building was previously home to Citarella’s, a neighborhood butcher that closed last July, ending an astonishing 121-year run as a business, the last 43 at this location at Prospect Avenue and McLaren Street.
Korrie Stavola, 35, of Middletown, owns Salt & Smoke with her mother and father, Andrea and Michael Stavola. The mother and daughter will run the shop. The family also own Driftwood Cabana Club in Sea Bright, and Salt & Smoke Kitchen, a catering operation.
“We’re Italian, so we’re always cooking at home,” and during the COVID-19 pandemic, “we were cooking up ideas,” too, Stavola said. Her father and brother, also named Michael, are barbecue aficionados who have a mobile BBQ cooker they use to cater special events.
“We realized, wow, we really need to have our own little space where we could share the cooking that we love with other people,” she said.
The new business is not an Italian market, as rumored: as reflected in the name, the focus is on seasoned meats, she said.
Nor is Salt & Smoke an attempt to replicate the grocery business Citarella’s, Stavola said.
“I love that they were in a residential area, and what they were doing here, and providing the community what you can’t get anymore,” she said.
But while Salt & Smoke’s refrigerators are still being stocked with staples such as milk and butter, and the shop will carry bread, honey, cookies and other products from local providers, the market won’t attempt to replicate the grocery aspect of its predecessor, she said. Instead, its focus is on butchered meats and prepared foods: salads, brisket sandwiches, pork tenderloins, barbecue sauces and more.
“We want to do our own thing,” Stavola said, and customers so far have complimented the staff on the freshness of the prepared foods, while offering suggestions for additional dishes, such as turkey London broil.
• Jane Kleiman has opened JK Ceramics / SquatterPotters at 43R Broad Street.
That’s a narrow room not visible from Broad: in fact, it’s accessed via a parking lot next to the Metropolitan apartments, on Wallace Street. It was previously occupied by Kattya Torres’ Denim Surgeon, which relocated to 29 Monmouth Street two years ago.
Kleiman told Churn Squatter Potters “was born from a small group of students using empty spaces in Red Bank to hold ceramics classes. We dubbed ourselves ‘SquatterPotters,’ and when the opportunity arose to open a studio for real, the name stuck.”
Kleiman, a borough resident and ceramic artist of 20-plus years, started the business, which offers four weekly classes in ceramics; one-on-one wheel-throwing lessons; and starting April 22, a six-week kids’s hand-building with clay class.
Student works are fired in a kiln on premise, Kleiman said.
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